A little later on in the century we get more positive evidence of how widespread the love of bowling was. "In 1673, two brothers, probably of English birth," says the "Domestic Annals of Scotland," "Edward Fountain of Loch-hill, and Captain James Fountain, had their patent formally proclaimed throughout Scotland as 'Masters of the Revels within the Kingdom.' They thus possessed a privilege of licensing and authorising balls, masks, plays, and such like entertainments. Nor was this quite such an empty or useless privilege as our traditionary notions of the religious objections formerly cherished against public amusements might have led us to suppose. The privilege of the Messrs. Fountain must have in time become an insupportable grievance to the lieges, or at least such of them as were inclined to embroider a little gaiety on the dull serge of common life." So grievous did their exactions become that, Lord Fountainhall tells us, when the Scots Parliament sat in August, 1681, among other proposals, "rumoured as designed to be past in Acts," was one against "Mr. Fountain's gift as Master of the Revels, by which he exacts so much off every bowling green, kyle alley, &c., throughout the kingdom, as falling under his gift of lotteries." Nothing was done then, but in 1684 another complaint was made that the Masters of the Revels went "almost through all Scotland" taxing every person who kept any such place of recreation; and an idea may be formed of the number of these places from the statement that they forced six thousand persons to compound with them, and had thus realised £16,000, "which is a most gross and manifest oppression." In the days of Charles I., when bowling of all kinds was so fashionable an amusement, the chief bowling place in London was the royal garden between Charing Cross and St. James's Park, known as Spring Garden, from a water-work in it that wetted those whose foot unguardedly pressed some part of its mechanism. Garrard, who was himself so devoted to bowling that he thus expresses the intensity of his concern for Northumberland's dangerous illness, "I never had so long a time of sorrow; for seven weeks I did nothing heartily but pray, nor sleep, nor eat; in all that time I never bowled "—in a letter to Lord Strafford, in 1634, says: "The bowling in the Spring Gardens was by the king's command put down for one day, but by the intercession of the queen it was reprieved for this year, but hereafter it shall be no common bowling place. There was kept in it an ordinary of six shillings a meal; continual bibbing and drinking wine all day long under the trees; two or three quarrels every week. It was grown scandalous and unsufferable. Besides, my Lord Digby, being reprehended for striking in the king's garden, he answered that he took it for a common bowling place where all paid money for their coming in." It is doubtful whether this reprieve was not made indefinite in Charles's tim、; at any rate the gardens seem to have been frequented by gay crowds till the time of the Civil War. Evelyn tells us "Cromwell and his partizans shut up and seized on Spring Garden," but we may see from his diary that even during the Commonwealth our games did not share in the condemnation accorded to so many other pastimes. Such a grave writer as Jeremy Taylor, in his " Ductor Dubitantium," written before 1657, includes bowling among pastimes that are "lawful" when separated from "evil appendages," and when the player is not immoderately addicted to them—" not playing for money but for refreshment." We have at least one reference to nine pins among the amusements of the exiled courtiers, when, in the "Grammont Memoirs," the Earl of Arran speaks of his sister-in-law, the Countess of Ossory, Miss Hyde, and Jermyn playing at nine pins in the gallery at Honslaerdyk. After the Restoration the favourite bowling places seem to have been at Marylebone Gardens and Putney, where, according to Locke, in 1679, “a curious stranger" might have seen "several persons of quality bowling two or three times a week." In the days of Pope and Gay, Buckingham and many others "bowled time away" in the famous alleys of the Marylebone Gardens, while in a puff of "The London Spa" in 1720 we are told that Now nine-pin alleys and now skittles grace We find occasional references to nine-pins being played by persons of quality" in later times, as in the interesting instance Samuel Rogers has preserved in his "Recollections." "In a walk round Hyde Park," he writes, "with Mr. Thomas Grenville [one of the elder brothers of William, Lord Grenville] in August, 1841, he said, 'My father lived at Wotton [Bucks], and if I remember right, it was in 1767, when I was in my twelfth year and my brother George and myself (Eton boys) were at home for the midsummer holidays, that Lord Chatham and Lord Temple came there on a visit. We dined at three o'clock, and at half-past four sallied out to the ninepins alley, where Lord Chatham and Lord Temple, two very tall men, the former in his fifty-ninth year, the latter in the fifty-seventh year of his age, played for an hour and a half, each taking one of us for his partner; the ladies sat by, looking on and drinking their coffee, and in our walk home we stopped to regale ourselves with a syllabub under the cow.'" Within the last century, however, penal statutes, and what Jeremy Taylor calls "evil appendages," have reduced skittle play to the low position it now holds in popular estimation. K 130 CHAPTER XI. CURLING. Of a' the games that e'er I saw, Was aye the witching channel stane. The Ettrick Shepherd. WHEN a black frost seals up the ground, and ice covers our ponds and lochs, among the amusements then open to those north of the Tweed there is none more healthful and exhilarating than the game of curling. This "manly Scottish exercise," as the old poet Pennycuick calls it, is, as we said in our chapter on golf, the worthiest rival of that pastime for the title of the national game of Scotland. Alas, however! it fights this battle under immense disadvantages. The good old times seem to have passed away when, for weeks on end, O'er burn and loch the warlock Frost and good ice might be confidently counted on for a long time. But this, far from disheartening curlers, only makes the ardent votaries of the game the more eager to take every advantage of such fleeting chances as the variable winters of our day send them. Night has often been added to day, when the interest in a great match has been more intense than the frost, and the ice has shown any signs of passing away. All this, and the endeavours made to get an artificial substitute for the too-fleeting ice of these days, shall be spoken of below. Meanwhile, the history of the game requires a few words. Endless disputes have raged about the origin of this sport; papers have been written to prove, on etymological and other grounds, that it was, and that it was not, introduced into Scotland by the Flemish emigrants who came over towards the end of the sixteenth century. All the words in the technical language of the game are of Low Country origin; but the "Noes" thought nothing of that, especially as one waggish enthusiast of their party had, they thought, triumphantly settled the origin of the game as native, or, at least, as of very great antiquity in Scotland, by the lines in "Ossian," telling how, "Amid the circle of stones, Swaran bends at the stone of might." He, however, was completely eclipsed by another patriotic joker who, in many verses, in the old Scots Magazine of last century, takes us much further back than the Fingalian heroes, and tells us how Auld Daddy Scotland sat ae day Bare-legged on a snawy brae, His brawny arms wi' cauld were blae, The wind was snelly blawing. When to him comes the King of gods, rebuking him for his grumbling against the weather: Quo' Jove, and gied his kilt a heeze, Fule carle! what gars you grunt and wheeze? Get up! I'll get an exercise, To het your freezing heart wi'. I'll get a cheery, heartsome game, And forthwith Jove explained to the shivering old fellow all the mysteries of our game. Where doctors so differ, in joke and in earnest, it is difficult to decide; but though curling is now so eminently a Scottish game, evidence goes to prove pretty clearly that the pastime was |